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CHAPTER IX
AT THE GATES OF PARADISE

Many women have advanced the doctrine that the happiest time of life is that of their engagement. Of course no man can possibly understand this theory; but from a woman's point of view it can be defended, because it is for some girls the most delightful thing in the world to be wooed; and until the church service is actually said and the ring is on the finger, the bride is Queen and Mistress; afterwards – not always. But the happiness of it depends upon its being a courtship without obstacles. Now, in the case of the young couple whose fortunes we are following, there was plenty of love with excellent wooing; but the engagement had been opposed by the whole tribe of Arundels, so that every time she met her lover it was in open rebellion against her mother. To go home from a walk with him only to find the silence of resentment at home was not pleasant. Again, we have seen how they were looking forward to a life of poverty – even of privation. Dame Penury with her pinching ways and shrewish tongue was going to be their constant lodger. Then the young man could not choose but ask himself whether he was not a selfish beast to take a girl out of plenty into privation. And the girl could not choose but ask herself whether she was not selfish in laying this great burden upon the back of her lover. No one can be indifferent to such a prospect: no one can contemplate with pleasure the cheeseparings, the savings, the management of such a life: no one can like having to make a penny do the work of sixpence: no one can rejoice as one steps down, down, down the social ladder: no one can anticipate with satisfaction the loss of gentlehood for the daughters, and the loss of an adequate education for the sons.

'You will make me happy,' said the lover, 'at the cost of everything that makes life happy for yourself.'

'If I make you happy,' said the girl, 'I ask for nothing more. But oh! I am laying a heavy burden upon you. Can you bear it? Will you never blame me if the burden is greater than you can bear?'

And now all the trouble vanished like a cloud from the morning sky – vanished so completely that there was not a trace of it left anywhere. The accusing figure of her mother was changed into a smiling face of pleased and satisfied maternity: reproaches were turned into words of endearment, angry looks to presents and caresses. And as for her sister, you might have thought that all this good fortune was actually achieved and conquered by Elsie – otherwise, how could one justify the praise and flattery that Hilda now lavished upon her? She gave a great dinner as a kind of official reception of the bridegroom into the family; she also gave a dance, at which she herself was the most beautiful woman – she stood in a conspicuous place all the evening, magnificently dressed, statuesque, wonderful: and Elsie was the prettiest girl at the party; but between the most beautiful woman and the prettiest girl was a difference! There is nothing like good fortune to bring out a girl's good qualities: Elsie had always had friends, now she might have numbered them by hundreds. Good fortune breeds friends as the sunshine creates the flowers. She was congratulated, caressed, and flattered enough to turn her head. Now, girls are so constituted that they love admiration, which is a kind of affection, even when it takes the form of flattery: and their heads may be easily turned; but they are as easily turned back again. And the house – the widow's house – which for so many years had been so dull and quiet a place, was transformed into a place of entertainment. It only wanted coloured lamps to make it another Vauxhall: it was crowded every night with the younger friends of bride and bridegroom. George had many friends. He was gregarious by nature: he was a rowing man on the athletic side: he had a healthy love and a light hand for things like billiards, shooting, and fishing: they are tastes which assist in the creation of friendships.

These friends – young fellows of like mind – came to the house in multitudes to rally round the man about to desert their ranks. Young men are forgiving: George would row no more among them: he would be lost to the billiard table, and to the club itself: yet they forgave him, and accepted his invitation and went to see the bride. They found her with the friends of her own age. Heavens! how the daring of one man in taking away a maiden from the band encourages others! There are six love stories at least, all rising out of these evenings, and all of surpassing interest, had one the time to write them. They are both grave and gay: there are tears in every one: the course of true love in no case ran smooth except in the Story of the Two Stupids. Love's enemies can never effect aught against a Stupid, and so these two Stupids became engaged without opposition, and were married with acclamations; but they are too Stupid – perhaps – to know their own happiness.

All this went on for three weeks. It was arranged that the happy pair should be married in the middle of August: they had resolved to spend their honeymoon in France, staying a few days in Paris, and then going on to see the towns and the country along the Loire, with the old city of Tours for their centre. They proposed to live entirely upon fruit and wine and kisses. No place in the world like Touraine for those who are so young, and so much in love, and so perfectly satisfied with so simple a diet. Even for those who take a cutlet with the fruit and the wine, there is no place equal to Touraine. Meantime, against the home-coming, a desirable flat was secured, not one of your little economical flats, all drawing-room with two or three rabbit-hutches for bedrooms, but a large and highly decorated flat with all the newest appliances, large rooms, and a lift and plenty of space for the dinner-parties and receptions which Elsie would have to give. The servants were engaged. The furniture was ordered, all in the advanced taste of the day – carpets, curtains, pictures, over-mantels, cabinets, screens. Elsie went every day to her new home and found something omitted, and sat down in it to wonder what it would be like – this new life she was entering upon. Oh! it was a busy time. – Then there was her trousseau – everybody knows the amount of thought and care required for a trousseau: this was approaching completion – everybody knows the happiness, peculiar, and unlike any other kind of happiness, with which a girl contemplates a heap of 'things,' all her own. I suppose that it is only at her wedding that she can enjoy this happiness, for afterwards, the 'things' are not her own, but the things of the family. The bride's dress, another thing of supreme importance, had been tried on, though as yet it was very, very far from being finished. The bridesmaids, two of George's sisters, had also already tried on their dresses. They came every day, two very sweet girls, who have both to do with those six love stories which will never, I fear, be told, to talk over the events and to see the presents. These came in daily, and were laid out in a room by themselves, looking very splendid: their splendour proved the wealth and the position of the pair, because rich presents are only given to rich people.

In a word, everybody was heartily, loyally sympathetic, as if to make up for the previous harshness and coldness. For four weeks this happiness lasted! It was on Monday, June 29, that the golden shower descended upon them: it was on Monday, July 20, that the rain of gold ceased, and another kind of cloud came up which speedily changed into a driving storm of rain and sleet and hail and ice and snow.

Look at them on Sunday. Before the storm there is generally a brief time of sunshine, warm and fine: after the storm, the calm that follows is a time of dismay, speechless and tearless. Sunday was the day before the storm: it was a day of sunshine without and within. The lovers spent the whole day together, hand in hand. They went to church together: they sat side by side, they warbled off the same hymn book. The service proved, as the preacher used to say, a season of refreshment, for never doth religion so uplift the soul as when it is entirely happy: the voices of the choir chanting the psalms filled them with joy, and would have done so even if they had been penitential minors, and the lamentation of a sinner. Their hearts rose higher and higher as the preacher exhorted, and would have flown upwards just as much whether he had brandished the terrors of the law or held out the gracious promise of the Gospel. For you see, at such a time as this, whatever was said or done only led this faithful pair farther and deeper into the shady glades and fragrant lawns and flowery dells of Love's Paradise.

Every church, at every service, and especially in the evening, contains many such lovers. You may know them by certain infallible signs. They sit very close together: they sing off the same book: their faces betray by the rigidity of their attitude, which is that of pretended attention, the far-away expression of their eyes, and the absence of any external sign of emotion or sympathy with the preacher, that their hands, beneath some folds of the feminine gabardine, are closely clasped. It has sometimes pleased the philosopher and relieved the tedium of a dull sermon to look round the congregation and to pick out the lovers – here a pair and there a pair. Even in the church, you see, Love is conqueror and king.

These lovers, therefore, went to church in a frame of mind truly heavenly: nobody in the whole congregation felt more deeply pious: every response was an Act of Praise: every prayer an Act of Gratitude: every hymn a personal Thank-offering. But beneath those seemingly calm faces was flying and rushing a whirlwind of hopes, memories, plans, projects, and gratitudes. He who looks back upon the days immediately before his wedding-day – most men no more remember their own emotions than a child remembers yesterday's earache – will wonder how he lived through that time of change, when all that he prayed for was granted, but on the condition of a turning upside down of all his habits, customs, and petted ways.

All round them sat the people, no doubt with minds wholly attuned to the service of Prayer and Praise. Well, the sheep in a flock to outward seeming are all alike, yet every animal has his own desires and small ambitions for himself. So I suppose with the congregation. As every man shuts the street door behind him and trudges along the way to church – the Via Sacra– with wife and children, he carries in his waistcoat pocket, close to his heart, a little packet of business cares to think upon during the sermon. And if all the thoughts of all the people could be collected after the sermon instead of the offertory, they would make a salutary oblation indeed.

'George,' said Elsie, as they came out, 'let us go into the Gardens and sit under a tree and talk. Let us get away from everybody for half an hour.'

Kensington Gardens were filled with the customary throng of those who, like themselves, had been to church. The carping philosopher says unkind things about Church, and Gardens, and Fashion. As if Church would ever keep like from congregating with like! There were shoals of beautiful girls, dressed as well as they knew or could afford: dozens of young fellows, and with them the no longer quite so young, the no longer young, the no longer young at all, the middle-aged, the elderly and the old, not to speak of the children. Elsie looked up and down the walk. 'We are never so much alone as in a crowd,' she said, with the air that some girls assume of saying an original thing which no woman ever did say yet, unless by accident. They joined the stream: presently George led the girl out of the road and across the grass to a place where two or three chairs were set under the trees. They sat down. Then occurred the miracle wrought in these gardens every day and all day long. Out of the ground sprang a man – for such he seemed, though doubtless a spirit-messenger – who demanded twopence. This paid, he vanished straightway. After this ceremony they talked.

'George,' said the girl, 'every day now, wherever I am, even at church, I feel as if I should like to jump up and sing and dance. This morning I should have liked a service all to ourselves – you to read and I to sing: you to pray and I to praise. I kept wondering if there was any girl in the place so happy as myself – or so unhappy as I was three short weeks ago.'

'Elsie,' said George – a simple thing to say, but it had a thousand meanings.

'We have not deserved it. Indeed, indeed – we have not. Why are we singled out for such joy? We already had the greatest thing of all – we had love. That is happiness enough for some women. We only wanted a little more money, and now we have all this great fortune.'

'It is wonderful, Elsie!'

She laid her hand on his and spoke in her sweet low voice, gazing upwards. 'George! I am so happy, that I want everybody else to be happy as well. The angels, I am sure, must lose some of their joy in wishing that all were with them. I pity all those poor girls who have no lovers: all those poor married people who are lying in poverty: all those poor creatures who are trying for what they cannot get; all those who are weeping outside the gates of Heaven. George, it is a beautiful world, and it should be such a happy world: there should be nothing but joy all through life. There is such an abundance of happiness possible in it. Sadness is only a passing cloud: anxiety is only a touch of east wind: evil and pain are only fleeting shadows.'

She sighed and clasped her hands, and the tears rose to her eyes.

'We shall grow old together, George,' she went on, murmuring rather than speaking. – I omit her lover's interruptions and interjections. – 'You will always love me, long after my beauty – you know you will call it beauty, George – is past and gone: even when I am a poor old crone doubled up in my arm-chair: you will always love me. My life will be full – full – full of love. Perhaps – ' Here her face flushed, and she stopped. 'We shall have no trouble about money: we shall go on always learning more and more, growing wiser and wiser and wiser. You will be a wise and good man, thinking and working all your life for other people, just as Mr. Dering imagined – three weeks ago. Everybody will love and respect you. Then you will grow grey-headed, you poor, dear boy; and all the world will say how wise and strong you are; and I shall be prouder of my old husband than even I was of my young lover. The life that others have dreamed, we shall live. Every day shall come laden with its own joy, so that we would not, if we could help it, suffer it to go away.' She struck a deeper note, and her voice trembled and sank and her eyes filled with tears: 'Life shall be all happiness, as God intended for us. Even Death will be little sorrow, for the separation will be so short.' Once more she laid her hand on his.

Even to the most frivolous, the prospect of the wedded life awakens grave and solemn thoughts: for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear and brains to understand, there is no prospect so charged with chances and possibilities, where even life itself may become a Death in Life.

When George left her in the evening, he drove to see Athelstan.

'So,' he said, 'you have been courting all day, I suppose. You ought to have had enough of it. Sit down and have something – a pipe – a cigar. – Well – you are going to be very jolly, I suppose. Elsie's little fortune will help a bit, won't it?'

'I should think so, indeed.'

'Yes – I've been very glad, ever since you told me that the child had had this stroke of luck. I wonder who gave her the money? To be sure, there is plenty of money knocking about among the Arundels. Most of us have had a sort of instinct for making money. Put us down anywhere among a lot of men in a city, and we begin to transfer the contents of their pockets to our own.'

'Meanwhile, give up this old resentment. Come back to your own people. Come to our wedding.'

'I cannot possibly, unless you will tell me who forged that cheque. How could I go back to people who still believe me guilty? When you are married, I will go and see Elsie, which I can do with a light heart. You have not told any one about my return?'

'Certainly not. No one suspects, and no one talks or thinks about you.'

Athelstan laughed a little. 'That is a doubtful piece of information. Am I to rejoice or to weep, because I am completely forgotten and out of mind? It is rather humiliating, isn't it?'

'You are not forgotten at all. That is a different thing. Only they do not speak of you.'

'Well, George, never mind that now. I am glad you came to-night, because I have some news for you. I have found the commissionaire who took the cheque to the Bank – actually found the man.'

'No! After all these years?'

'I wrote out the particulars of the case – briefly. Yesterday I took the paper to the commissionaires' barrack in the Strand and offered a reward for the recovery of the man who had cashed the cheque. That same evening the man presented himself and claimed the reward. He remembered the thing very well – for this reason: the gentleman who employed him first sent him with a bag to a Parcel Delivery Office: he did not look at the address. The gentleman was staying at the Cecil Hotel. Now the commissionaire was a one-armed man. Because he had only one arm, the gentleman – who was a pleasant-spoken gentleman – gave him ten shillings for his trouble, which was nine shillings more than his proper pay. The gentleman sent him to the Bank with this cheque to cash, and he returned with seven hundred and twenty pounds in ten-pound notes. Then it was that the gentleman – who seems to have been a free-handed gentleman – gave him the ten shillings. The man says that he would know that gentleman anywhere. He was old, and had grey hair. He says that he should know him wherever he saw him. What do you think of that?'

'Well – it is something, if you could find that old man.'

'Why, of course it was Checkley – grey-haired Checkley. We'll catch that old fox, yet. Beware of Checkley. He's a Fox. He's a Worm. He's a creeping Centipede. When the old man goes, you must make Checkley pack.'

CHAPTER X
A MYSTERIOUS DISCOVERY

On Monday morning the Unexpected happened. It came with more than common malignity. In fact, nothing more threatening to the persons chiefly concerned in the calamity could have happened, though at first they were happily spared the comprehension of its full significance.

There is a wide-spread superstition – so wide that it must be true – that at those rare moments when one feels foolishly happy, at peace with all the world, at peace with one's own conscience, all injuries forgiven, the future stretched out before like a sunlit peaceful lake, some disaster, great or small, is certainly imminent. 'Don't feel too happy,' says Experience Universal. The Gods resent the happiness of man. Affect a little anxiety. Assume a certain sadness. Restrain that dancing leg. If you must shake it, do so as if by accident, or as if in terror – for choice, shake it over an open grave in the churchyard. Stop singing that song of joy; try the Lamentation of a Sinner instead. So will the Gods be deceived. Above all, never allow yourself to believe that the Devil is dead. He is not even asleep. By carefully observing these precautions, a great many misfortunes may be averted. If, for instance, George had gone home soberly on Sunday night instead of carrying on like a schoolboy in playtime, obviously happy, and so inviting calamity, perhaps he would never have been connected – as he afterwards became – with this disaster.

You have heard that Mr. Dering was a man of method. Every morning he arrived at his office at a quarter before ten: he hung up his coat and hat in a recess behind the door: he then opened his safe with his own hand. Checkley had already laid out the table with a clean blotting-pad, pens, and letter-paper: he had also placed the letters of the day upon the pad. The reading of the letters began the day's work. The lawyer read them, made notes upon them, rang for his shorthand clerk, and dictated answers. These dispatched, he turned to the standing business. This morning, with the usual routine, he was plodding through the letters of the day, taking up one after the other, and reading half mechanically. Presently he opened one, and looked at the heading. 'Ellis & Northcote,' he said. 'What do they want?' Then he suddenly stopped short and started. Then he began the letter again, and again he stopped short. It was from his brokers in the City, and it recommended a certain advantageous investment. That was not in itself very extraordinary. But it contained the following remarkable passage: 'You have made such great transfers and so many sales during the last few months that you have probably more profitable uses for money in your own business. But if you should have a few thousands available at the present moment, it is a most favourable opportunity – '

'Great transfers and many sales?' asked Mr. Dering, bewildered. 'What transfers? What sales does he mean?'

He turned over the pages of his Diary. He could find no transactions of the kind at all. Then he reflected again. 'I can remember no transfers,' he murmured. 'Is this another trick of memory?'

Finally, he touched the bell upon his table.

'Checkley,' said Mr. Dering, on the appearance of the ancient clerk, 'I have got a letter that I don't understand at all. I told you that my memory was going. Now you see. Here is a letter about transfers and sales of stock. What transfers? I don't understand one word of it. My memory is not only going – it is gone.'

'Memory going? Nonsense,' the old man shook his head. 'No – no; your memory is all right. Mine is as clear as a bell. So's yours. You eat hearty. So do I. You sleep well. So do I. We're both as hale and hearty as ever.'

'No – no. My memory is not what it was. I've told you so a dozen times. I lose myself sometimes. Yesterday, when the clock struck twelve, I thought it was only ten. I had lost two hours. And sometimes when I walk home, I lose recollection of the walk afterwards.'

'Tut, tut; nobody of your age is such a young man as you. Why, you walk like five-and-twenty. And you eat hearty – you eat very hearty.' His words were encouraging, but he looked anxiously at his master. Truly, there was no apparent decay in Mr. Dering. He sat as upright: he looked as keen: he spoke as clearly, as ever.

'Well – about this letter. My friend Ellis, of Ellis & Northcote, writes to me about something or other, and speaks of my effecting great transfers and sales of stock lately. What does he mean?'

'You haven't bought or sold any stock lately, that I know of.'

'Well, you would have known. – Have we had to make any investments for clients of late? There was the Dalton-Smith estate.'

'That was eleven months ago.'

'I suppose he must mean that – he can't mean anything else. Yes, that is it. Well – I've got a Partner now, so that it matters less than it would have done – had my memory played me tricks with no other responsible man in the place.'

'You didn't want a partner,' said Checkley jealously. 'You had ME.'

'He must mean that,' Mr. Dering repeated. 'He can't mean anything else. However – has my Bank book been made up lately?'

'Here it is. Made up last Friday. Nothing been in or out since.'

Mr. Dering had not looked at his book for three or four months. He was well served: his people took care of his Bank book. Now he opened it, and began to run his finger up and down the pages.

'Checkley,' he said, 'what has happened to Newcastle Corporation Stock? The dividends were due some weeks ago. They are not paid yet. Is the town gone bankrupt? And – eh? Where is Wolverhampton? And – and – ' He turned over the paper quickly. 'Checkley, there is something wrong with the book. Not a single dividend of anything entered for the last four months. There ought to have been about six hundred pounds in that time.'

'Queer mistake,' said Checkley. 'I'll take the book round to the Bank, and have it corrected.'

'A very gross and careless mistake, I call it. Tell the manager I said so. Let it be set right at once, Checkley – at once – and while you wait. And bring it back to me.'

The Bank was in Chancery Lane, close to the office. The old clerk went off on his errand.

'A very careless mistake,' the lawyer repeated; 'any clerk of mine who committed such a mistake should be dismissed at once.' In fact, the certainty of full and speedy justice kept Mr. Dering's clerks always at a high level of efficiency.

He returned to the letters, apparently with no further uneasiness.

After ten minutes, Checkley taking longer than he expected, Mr. Dering became aware that his attention was wandering. 'Great transfers and many sales,' he repeated. 'After all, he must mean the investment of that Dalton-Smith money. Yet that was only a single transaction. What can he mean? He must have made a mistake. He must be thinking of another client. It's his memory, not mine, that is confused. That's it – his memory.'

The large open safe in the corner was filled with stacks of paper tied up and endorsed. These papers contained, among other things, the securities for the whole of Mr. Dering's private fortune, which was now very considerable. Even the greatest City magnate would feel for Mr. Dering the respect due to wealth if he knew the amount represented by the contents of that safe. There they were, the leases, agreements, mortgages, deeds, bonds, conveyances, shares, all the legal documents by which the wicked man is prevented from seizing and appropriating the rich man's savings. Formerly the rich man kept his money in a box with iron bands. He locked up the box and put it in a recess in the cellar contrived in the stone wall. If he was only a bourgeois, it was but a little box, and he put it in a secret place (but everybody knew the secret) at the head of his bed. If he were a peasant, he tied his money up in a clout and put it under the hearthstone. In any case, thieves broke in and stole those riches. Now, grown wiser, he has no box of treasures at all: he lends it all in various directions and to various associations and companies. Every rich man is a money-lender: he is either Shylock the Great or Shylock the Less, according to the amount he lends. Thieves can steal nothing but paper which is no use to them. As we grow wiser still, we shall have nothing at all in any house that can be of any use to any thief, because everything in the least valuable will have its papers, without the production of which nothing of value will be bought or sold. And all the gold and silver, whether forks or mugs, will be lodged in the Bank. Then everybody will become honest, and the Eighth Commandment will be forgotten.

Among Mr. Dering's papers were share certificates, bonds, and scrip of various kinds, amounting in all to a great many thousands. Of this money a sum of nearly thirteen thousand pounds belonged to Elsie, but was still in her guardian's name. This, of course, was the fortune which had fallen so unexpectedly into the girl's hands. The rest, amounting to about twenty-five thousand pounds, was his own money. It represented of course only a part, only a small part, of his very respectable fortune.

Mr. Dering, whose memory, if it was decaying, was certainly clear on some points, looked across the room at the open safe, and began to think of the papers representing their investments. He remembered perfectly all the different Corporation Stock. All the water, gas, railway shares, the Indian Stock and the Colonial Stock: the Debenture companies and the Trading companies. He was foolish, he thought, to be disturbed by a mere mistake of the broker: his recent lapses of memory had made him nervous: there could be nothing wrong: but that clerk at the Bank ought to be dismissed for carelessness. There could be nothing wrong: for the sake of assurance he would turn out the papers: but there could be nothing wrong.

He knew very well where they were; everything in his office had its place: they were all tied up together in a bulky parcel, bestowed upon a certain shelf or compartment of the safe. He pushed back his chair, got up, and walked over to the safe.

Strange! The papers were not in their place. Again he felt the former irritation at having forgotten something. It was always returning: every day he seemed to be forgetting something. But the certificates must be in the safe. He stood irresolutely looking at the piles of papers, trying to think how they could have been displaced. While he was thus wondering and gazing, Checkley came back, Bank-book in hand.

'There is something wrong,' he said. 'No dividends at all have been paid to your account for the last three months. There is no mistake at the Bank. I've seen the manager, and he's looked into it, and says there can't be any mistake about the entries.'

'No dividends? What is the meaning of it, Checkley? No dividends? Why, there's thirty-eight thousand pounds worth of stock. The certificates are kept here in the safe; only, for some reason or other, I can't find them at the moment. They must be in the safe somewhere. Just help me to find them, will you?'

He began to search among the papers, at first a little anxiously, then nervously, then feverishly.

'Where are they?' he cried, tossing over the bundles. 'They must be here. They must be here. Let us turn out the whole contents of the safe. We must find them. They have never been kept in any other place. Nobody has touched them or seen them except myself.'

The old clerk pulled out all the papers in the safe and laid them in a great pile on the table. When there was nothing left in the safe, they began systematically to go through the whole. When they had finished, they looked at each other blankly.